Just after Christmas in 2012, a punk band called The Menzingers played the Asbury Lanes. It was a secret show, announced an hour or so before doors opened, the kind of show you needed to be tight with a certain group of people to know about. I found out about it in just enough time to drive to Asbury Park, and I waited outside the venue on 4th Avenue with my best friends. We shivered in the beachfront cold with the light from the bowling pin sign out front shining on our faces. I tried to remember exactly what the Lanes’ top capacity was as I counted the heads in front of me.

Everyone shipped away to college that summer, leaving me to drive around Deal Lake alone, listening to music through my blown-out car speakers. The tourists left town and the ocean got colder, but when my friends came home in December and the Menzingers happened to be in town, I knew we would skip curfew and show up, regardless of whatever we had planned for that night. The band took the stage just after midnight, and we took to the crowd, and the Menzingers ripped through a dozen songs as our sweaty bodies collided into leather jackets and the glossy floor of the bowling alley. We danced all night.

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Something you’ll learn by speaking with anyone who frequented the Asbury Lanes is that everyone has a Lanes story, and in most stories, the music comes second. Yes, I saw the Menzingers create history at the Lanes that December, but I can’t remember a single song they played because I only remember my friends’ faces and that forgotten feeling of being home with them. Pro wrestler CM Punk was allegedly in the venue that night. I didn’t see him, but I believe that story, because I’ve heard it from people who knew the magic that old bowling alley created. I have no reason to doubt them.

When the Lanes closed for renovations in 2015, the developers that purchased the building insisted that it’d reopen in the following spring, but it didn’t, and the whispers around the scene got a bit louder. At shows at other venues, in between bands, you’d overhear someone in the crowd talk about how this show would have been at the Lanes, how much better it would have been there, how it’s all a shame. The shadow of the Lanes hung heavy over the city, like some friend who’d gone away. We all hoped it’d come back.

This week, Asbury Lanes owner iStar announced plans to reopen the venue on Memorial Day weekend. The Asbury Park Press reported images of the redesigned interior. Gone are the paintings on the walls, the vintage décor, the support beams where every local band would slap their homemade stickers. Instead, there’s a gaudy diner sign, tacky bean-bag chairs, and an aesthetic that screams that the undesirables, the punks who built this place, who only have five dollars for the show and maybe a few dollars for pizza afterward, are no longer welcome.

When I was a teenager walking into the Asbury Lanes for the first time, and I saw that decade’s worth of old stickers, I knew I was walking into something tremendous. It was easy to see the musical fabric with which Asbury was built when you walked in and purchased your ticket to whatever show rolled through that night. I still wonder if they took those stickers off that pole before they knocked it down.

Development is inevitable, and despite the economic segregation caused by the gentrification of the waterfront, it is impossible to keep things the way they’ve been forever; just ask anyone who had a special affinity for the Palace Amusements. Still, the repackaging of my memories at the Lanes feels especially sacrilegious.

The Asbury Lanes was not just a venue. It was a living symbol of the community that inhabited it. It was a place you could enter on any given weekend and realize that you are not alone, even if you feel alone. When you walked in the front door and saw those stickers, those friends, those bands, you’d know you were somewhere special and welcoming. Unless iStar can prove they will work to retain the sense of belonging and community that the Asbury Lanes fostered, there is no point in reopening the old bowling alley that housed it. The Asbury Lanes should stay closed. Everything that made it what it was has already moved on.